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With the gracious help of LoopNet volunteers, Urban Sprouts broke ground at the new International Studies Academy (ISA) garden! Folks from LoopNet worked long and hard to repair the front garden:
They also dug deep in ground so hard and full of rocks that they were able to line a new pumpkin patch with all the large rocks they pulled out of the ground. Yet another group built a chicken tractor and another repaired tool sheds and the existing beds. We had many supportive and enthusiastic teachers, staff and parents stop by and encourage our work. Thank you LoopNet! Thank you Darren at SF School Volunteers for bringing us all together. And thank you Principal Sanderson for inviting us to be at ISA!
Top: Jose, Vera, Lisa, and Mario in the Victory Garden
Bottom: Urban Sprouts hanging out in Mayor Gavin Newsom's office. Mario, when you become mayor, you will remember to put a garden in every school, right?
Okay, by now everyone and their grandmother has heard about the Slow Food Nation conference, which is quickly approaching – the first such event in the country! I think that most of us in the urban & sustainable agriculture / school garden worlds are excited that these issues are now garnering deserved notoriety.
While most of the workshops require that you purchase tickets, one of the most exciting programs of the conference is free to all – the incredible Victory Garden currently installed at Civic Center Plaza. If you haven't seen it, try to visit soon, because in September the garden will be dismantled and all the veggies will be given to charity.
Last week, I took two Urban Sprouts students from MLK Middle School on a tour of the Victory Garden, City Hall, and the Civic Center Farmer’s Market. We started off at the farmer's market, sampling the fresh fare and chatting with vendors. I was SO proud when the boys, both alums of our Summer Program, were filled with questions about the produce - they asked the beekeepers about how to extract honey, learned how to select the sweetest peaches, and tried new and pungent cheeses. Jose's pleas for soda aside, the boys were engaged and excited to be amidst the activity of the market. At one point Mario said to me, "I always thought this place looked boring from the outside, but this is so much fun!" Both of them went home with summer berries and white nectarines.
Afterwards, we went on a brief walk around City Hall, where I interned this summer in the Mayor's Office of Neighborhood Services. The highlight was when my former supervisor, Mike Farrah, took us to see Gavin Newsom's office (who was away on his honeymoon). The boys had a blast sitting in "Gav's" chair!
We finished the afternoon in the Victory Garden with a picnic lunch. While the garden is indeed lovely, and amazingly prolific, its beauty goes beyond its physical features. Whenever I visit the garden, I am blown away to see how people respond to it – visitors are genuinely curious and delighted to see food growing in front of City Hall. It is a bold statement and shows how urban farming is finally being embraced by a mainstream audience. The students were impressed by the volume of food that was being grown in a limited space (and in our unpredictable San Francisco climate, no less!) By the end of the day, they had the same question that has been on everybody's mind: why can't this garden be a permanent part of the Civic Center?
For more information on the Slow Food Nation event and the Victory Garden Movement:
Slow Food Nation
Victory Gardens 2008+
Garden for the Environment
Just a few bits of news in the Urban Sprouts world that I didn't want you to miss!
Summer Team: Suzi, Julius, Vilma, Lisa, DeAdrienne, Sophia, Abby.
Missing: Esperanza, Nicole, Cesia.
Lisa Chen
Garden Educator, Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School & Ida B Wells High School.Lisa served as an Urban Sprouts Garden Educator during the 2007-2008 school year. When she joined us, she introduced herself in this way: "I am delighted to join Urban Sprouts as a Garden Educator! I have worked with youth for the past six years. During my time as an Architecture student at UC Berkeley, I served as an AmeriCorps member at Berkeley High School, providing tutoring and college counseling. After I graduated I became interested in outdoor education and went on to develop community programs at Hidden Villa, a non-profit organic farm and wilderness preserve in Los Altos Hills. Afterwards, I spent a year living in Costa Rica and Ecuador. In Costa Rica I worked as a classroom aide at the Cloud Forest School, a bilingual environmental education school in Monteverde, and in Ecuador I supported sustainable agriculture projects in rural and indigenous communities. These experiences in nature profoundly affected me, and I believe that everyone deserves this opportunity to be outdoors and to learn about how we are connected to the earth and to each other."
Now Lisa serves as a member of our Advisory Board, where she still contributes her wide variety of amazing skills and shares her commitment to our city's youth!
The Urban Sprouts chicken coop at June Jordan School for Equity is completed and the lovely hens are doing well! However our hens remain nameless. We are inviting you, our reader, to submit names for the birds. Just submit your suggested names in the comments. At the beginning of the Fall 2008 school year, students in the Urban Sprouts Food Systems class will select the winning names. We even have little prizes for those whose name have been selected.
Pictures of the hens to be named have been provided below for inspiration. Urban Sprouts would like to thank the many people that helped implement the chicken coop! A big thank you goes to those nailed, drilled, sawed, climbed, carried, balanced, and dug to make it happen: Reggie, Juan Carlos, JJSE students and teachers, Isadora, Kevin and the Google Serve group! Thank you!!
Breed: Cuckoo Maran; Likes: spending early mornings looking for grubs
Breed: Plymouth Barred Rock; Likes: imperiously watching other hens from the perch
Breed: Blue Andalusian; Likes: dancing and singing into the wee hours
Breed: Araucana; Likes: running in open spaces
Breed: Silver Laced Wyandotte; Likes: having her picture taken...and cooked rice
We are having so much fun at the Urban Sprouts and Garden for the Environment Summer Program, now in the middle of our second week. The 21 youth—16 middle school youth and 5 high school youth staff—are working in the garden, cooking lunch from garden-grown produce, and learning all about organic gardening, recycling & composting, nutrition, and where food comes from!
Yesterday we took a field trip to Slide Ranch in Muir Beach, across the Golden Gate Bridge. There, we milked goats, handled chickens, and explored the gardens.
Check out our photos to see everything we've been up to!
Announcing the newest addition to the Urban Sprouts line, Summer Program t-shirts! Choose from two designs—flowers or beets—both created by Lisa Chen.
The elbow-length raglan tee from American Apparel is available in pink or baby blue, or choose the organic cotton tee. Click on the items above or visit our store on Cafe Press and be the first on your block to show them off!
Outcomes and Activities:
During the 2007-2008 school year, Urban Sprouts planned to reach 500 students in the 6th through 12th grades at five San Francisco public schools serving the city’s most under-served neighborhoods.
Urban Sprouts greatly surpassed this goal, reaching a total of 728 students this year. Urban Sprouts partnered with five schools: Aptos Middle School, Excelsior Middle School, Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School, June Jordan School for Equity, and Ida B. Wells Continuation High School. These schools serve San Francisco neighborhoods including the OMI/Excelsior, Sunnydale, Visitacion Valley, Portola, Bayview-Hunters Point, and Western Addition. Of students reached, 64% were low-income students, 96% were youth of color, and 52% were defined as educationally disadvantaged by the San Francisco Unified School District.
We provided the following activities at our five school sites:
In class Garden-based Education. Over 688 students participated in Urban Sprouts’ core garden-based education 
program that takes place during science classes. The garden-based classes meet for one hour every other week throughout the school year for a total of 20 hours of participation for every student. Each session is led by the Garden Educator and includes interactive academic learning and garden work. Every student experienced the full process of planting, growing, harvesting and eating crops from the school garden at least three times during the school year. By participating in the entire process, students have strengthened their ecoliteracy and environmental responsibility.
An additional 18 high school students at June Jordan School for Equity participated in a semester-long elective course focused entirely on sustainable agriculture and food production. This garden-based curriculum included weekly lessons that took place in the school garden, curriculum on nutrition, food production, distribution and marketing, food policy, farm economics, and the environmental impact of agriculture, as well as a farm field trip to Hidden Villa Ranch in Los Altos, California.
Garden-based Youth Leadership. We partnered with teachers and students to identify leadership opportunities for smaller groups of students, to engage more intensively with the garden and to lead related school-wide activities. These opportunities involved 15 students:
- Excelsior Middle School: Seven students in Urban Sprouts’ after school program created, implemented and evaluated a school-wide recycling program. Students led a waste diversion campaign that included posters, monitoring recycling bins at lunch, and calculating the school’s waste diversion percentage, with support from San Francisco’s Department of the Environment.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School: Eight students in Urban Sprouts’ after school Garden Club conducted an Earth Day awareness campaign. Students from all of MLK’s 6th and 7th grade classes decorated paper shopping bags with messages about Earth Day and about reusing and recycling waste materials. The after school Garden Club brought the bags to a local supermarket on Earth Day and gave them out to shoppers to reuse for their shopping.
Summer Program. For the second summer, Urban Sprouts partnered with the Garden for the Environment (GFE) to host a two-week summer program for 21 youth, meeting for four hours each day at the GFE. Urban Sprouts trained and supervised 5 high school students who served as staff for the 16 middle school-aged participants. The Summer Program included: daily garden work; an intensive curriculum on gardening, waste diversion, nutrition and sustainable agriculture; daily harvest and preparation of a healthy lunch, and the creation of a culminating event in which youth shared their learning with their families and friends and created take-home actions to apply their learning at home (examples included kits for home recycling, composting, and gardening).
Family Programming. Our school partners identified increased parent engagement as a major goal, and 
encouraged Urban Sprouts to utilize the school garden for this purpose. In addition, changes in youth attitudes and behaviors of environmental responsibility achieve greater impact with parent support and reinforcement at home. Urban Sprouts participated in three school-wide events for parents and held twelve meetings and workshops, engaging 63 school parents with the school garden and with cooking projects using garden-grown produce.
Due to feedback from school parents, we are redesigning the format of this program. During the next school year, family programming will include family garden plots within school gardens, in which families will showcase cultural gardening practices while producing food for their own consumption. The new garden plots will be installed in October 2008 with support from Clif Bar.
School Farm and Food Connection. In order to connect the school community to local farms and healthy food options, Urban Sprouts took four groups of students on farm field trips to Hidden Villa Ranch in Los Altos, California and to Slide Ranch in Muir Beach, California. In addition, we helped students and parents at Excelsior Middle School to design and practice preparing healthy meals made from fresh produce, so the group could prepare these meals while traveling on a school field trip to Washington, DC. Lastly, Urban Sprouts participated in efforts to revise the SFUSD Wellness Policy through the Student Nutrition and Physical Activity Committee, in order to continually increase opportunities for students district-wide to improve their health, wellness and the environmental impact of their schools.
Events. During the 2007-08 school year, Urban Sprouts hosted these community-wide events to build involvement in the garden program:
- Salad Days: students at all three middle schools harvested, prepared and served school-grown salads to the entire school at lunch;
- Garden Work Parties: students and staff at each school site hosted garden work days, including gardening, harvesting, cooking, and other activities, attended by students, families, teachers and community members.
Volunteers. Urban Sprouts recruited community members to develop and maintain the gardens through work days, and to volunteer in teachers’ classrooms during garden-based lessons. Classroom volunteers lowered the youth-adult ratio from as high as 35:1 to as low as 5:1. In total, 22 volunteers provided over 400 hours of support to students in the school garden, while 110 volunteers including employee groups from Act Now, Clif Bar, Skywire, Sutter Health, and Google contributed 440 hours helping to build wheelchair-accessible garden beds, worm bins, and a new chicken coop in the garden.
Evaluation and Outcomes:
Each year, Urban Sprouts conducts surveys and focus groups to determine the degree of students’ new knowledge, attitudes and behaviors after participating in our programs. Urban Sprouts’ objectives include increases in students’ ecoliteracy, environmental awareness and preferences for consuming fruits and vegetables as a result of participating in our programs.
This year, Urban Sprouts implemented an online pre- and post-test survey questionnaire, student focus groups and key informant interviews. This data is currently being analyzed by Urban Sprouts’ Evaluation Specialist, Michelle M. Ratcliffe, Ph.D. We will share our results on our website as soon as they are complete.
Currently, we have results of Urban Sprouts’ program evaluation conducted by Dr. Ratcliffe from 2004 to 2006 in our middle school programs. We have exciting results to share. Urban Sprouts’ evaluation showed that the garden-based learning experiences:
- Influenced the school’s curricular, physical and social learning environments.
- Affected students’ environment-related skills and knowledge, and attitudes and preferences towards the environment.
- Provided opportunities for students to begin to make sense of the natural world and their relationship to it.
- Influenced students’ social and moral development including strengthening their resiliency traits of pride, patience, hard work, team work, and motivation.
- Influenced students’ willingness to try new foods, decreased their consumption of less nutritious foods, and increased their physical activity level.
- Participating students increased their preferences for a variety of vegetables, the variety of vegetables they eat and how often they eat them.
